Transparency of the organization and activity of carbon funds

ABSTRACT

Public and mixed carbon funds buy carbon credits on behalf of public authorities and make use of public money, thus there is a need for clear information regarding their operations. The paper presents a new transparency index for the organization and activity of carbon funds that takes account of information disclosed via the internet. The construction of the index is based on the Linaburg-Maduell Transparency Index for sovereign wealth funds. The empirical study demonstrates that public and mixed carbon funds varied significantly in terms of their transparency but, in general, mixed carbon funds performed slightly better than public carbon funds.

KEYWORDS:

• Carbon funds
• information disclosure
• public spending
• transparency
• transparency index

Acknowledgements

I thank PMM’s anonymous reviewers and Kamilla Marchewka-Bartkowiak for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article. The research presented in this paper was funded by the National Science Centre, Poland (project no 2014/13/N/HS4/03625).